


a dirty knife dug deep

by Anonymous



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Anal Sex, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Forced Orgasm, Not Safe Sane and Consensual, Oral Sex, Vaginal Sex, unsafe power play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:40:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29516850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The memory of Molag Bal’s voice crawling through her bones whispered in her mind as she tread the dusty winding path up to the fortress.Written for the Skyrim Kink Meme in 2015
Relationships: Female Dovahkiin | Dragonborn/Molag Bal
Kudos: 33
Collections: Anonymous Fics





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> please heed the tags and warnings :)

Malyani killed the vigilant for necessity; she slew the priest of Boethiah for spite, having fled Boethiah’s commands once before. And true, Molag Bal's cold attention was on the back of her neck like a weighty hand the entire time, driving her pulse up with fear, and her skin had crawled to even step inside Markarth before she'd completed his task, but. But. She could tell herself she wasn't entirely forced to do it. And he hadn't contradicted her because...well, for someone – creature – Daedric Prince – who proclaimed her his champion, he didn't seem to think her very important at all.

Two months after she'd tortured a gasping, frail old man into damnation she woke up shivering in the night, waiting for that deep, amused voice to toll in her ear, to crawl into her skull and make itself at home. She'd curl up in her bedroll, fire flickering cheerfully, and focus on Volstagg's uninterrupted snores to pretend she wasn't afraid and more, to pretend she wasn’t listening with everything in her.

He never spoke to her. He never showed himself. She'd been a tool in his great plan, used and discarded.

Carelessly, Malyani relaxed.

Even so, she wasn’t stupid. The memory of Molag Bal’s voice crawling through her bones whispered in her mind as she trod the dusty winding path up to the fortress. His indifference seemed complete, but you couldn’t count on Daedric Princes to be predictable. Best that she was forgettable, agreeable, gave the appearance of a sheeplike pawn.

Itwas just - thing was, Malyani hated vampires. She hated the insidious sensation of her life slipping out of her skin. She hated the way they called her food. She hated the way their thralls fought with empty eyes, like someone had scooped the mind right out of them. The very thought made her want to puke.

When Malyani hated something, she wanted to get rid of it. Perhaps unwisely, she’d done the exact same thing with her uncertainty over Molag Bal’s dominion. Was the Prince who’d crawled inside her head and hissed with pleasure as she broke his enemies still paying attention? Better if he wasn’t, she knew better if he wasn’t, better if she was insignificant in every way - but she hated worrying about the question so she’d crushed it down inside. In light of that, it was perhaps too easy to convince herself to take Isran’s offer.

It took a night and a day to learn what he thought of it.

His voice scraped into her skull in her bed at the Bannered Mare. He snarls, _‘such insolence. My servant, turning against my creatures. Have we been collecting delusions of grandeur while I am away?’_

She’d scrabbled, uselessly, for a weapon. “I am not your servant,” she whispered. She was kneeling in the middle of her bed, pulse pounding like a drum, ice-sweet terror flooding her veins. The might of a Daedric Prince seemed poised to fall upon her from any angle, his dark presence infusing the familiar and usually comforting wooden planks of the ceiling. The noise from below seems stalled, and all at once she realizes she must have cried out, and violently.

_‘Wrong.’_

“Excuse me?” There was a scratching at the door.

“One - “ Malyani’s voice was a raw croak. “One moment!”

Sibilant, hissing whispers of a surprisingly soft chuckle rushed around her. She shuddered and bounced up to her feet in reaction, spinning around nervously. There was nothing for her to fight. There was nothing she could defend herself against.

“I’m not your servant,” she gritted out, trying to keep her voice low and perfectly controlled. “And if I have to wipe every one of your wretched spawn off the face of the earth to prove that to you - “

The last time she’d rejected his authority he’d laughed and dismissed it as futile mortal quaverings. Now a _snarl_ rolled through her gut. Her legs folded under her and she braced her hands on the bed and focused on breathing through the thundering pulse of his disapproval.

But the snarl subsided. Too calmly, she heard, ‘ _my creatures will teach you the error of your ways, and when they’ve broken you and your soul flees, then you’re mine to discipline. And I will take…_ time _...with you._

Someone cleared their throat.

Malyani’s head jerked up. Hulda stood in the doorway, an iron poker in one hand and a quizzical look on her face. “You cried out,” the innkeeper said.

And Hulda had come upstairs. Molag Bal’s voice had abated in her presence, and Malyani found herself ludicrously grateful for the woman’s presence, though she knew the innkeeper had hardly forced the Daedric Prince into hiding.

She realized she was kneeling in the middle of her bed with a knife drawn. “A bad dream only,” she said, attempting to smile. Hulda examined her, then gave a brisk nod. She was a brave woman indeed; the last time strange sounds had come from Malyani’s room in Whiterun she’d been wrestling an assassin onto the floor to slit his throat.

“I see,” Hulda said, and retreated without further query.

Malyani dressed with shaking fingers but a budding, savage sense of triumph. How much could she get away with? Apparently, more than she’d dreamed. He’d frightened her - he’d threatened her - but her death was a long way ahead of her. She was the _Dragonborn._

And he hadn’t said he’d stop her.

She started to laugh, shakily, and then clapped a hand over her mouth.

Well, he was paying attention to his champion now.

‘ _Take his offer._ ’

Malyani almost stumbled in her backwards step. Harkon’s eyes cleaved into her, suspicious and disdainful, but Molag Bal’s voice drowned everything out.

‘ _Take his offer_ ,’ the Prince advised. ‘ _Redeem yourself with this submission._ ’

“I will not,” she blurted aloud. Molag Bal’s chuckle smeared into her mind like dark mist, almost fogging her senses, but she was aware enough to hear Harkon take offence.

‘ _Mortals fight,_ ’ Molag Bal intoned almost conversationally, ‘ _and writhe like worms on a hook, but I have them all in the end. As I will have you. Your Dawnguard cannot protect you._ ’

She staggered on the rocky shore when the magic dropped her there, falling and catching herself on her hands. Her stomach threatened to rebel and she lowered her head - and felt a pressure, icy, at the back of her neck. He kept her on her knees while she gasped for breath, furious.

‘ _I may peel you apart, nerve ending by nerve ending,_ ’ he continued. ‘ _Not such blunt tactics as human hands and a rusted mace - he broke easy, do you remember?_ ’ She did. Divines save her, but she did. ‘ _Your suffering, I could make last for centuries._ ’

She pushed off the ground and the pressure evaporated. Perhaps only her imagination had conjured it, her fear serving him just as well as a presence on this plane. Time to head back to Dawnguard fortress and accept her next mission.

She wiped the back of her hand over her mouth. “I won’t submit,” she whispered.

He laughed.

Her thumb gouged into the master vampire’s eye. They were so close it was almost intimate, and she knew she was bleeding under the press of the vampire’s hands as he drew her life force away. His eyeball popped wetly and he screamed, lost his concentration, and allowed her to shove the blazing knife between his ribs.

She kicked him away from her and the fire raced through his body, helped by magic but fed by the enchantments she’d laid on the blade to loathe and repulse undead flesh.

‘ _Such a bloodthirsty little thing._ ’ Molag Bal’s voice scraped across the cavernous walls and ceiling and she dropped her dagger out of shock, feeling his serrated amusement scrape across her skin as if she lay naked on volcanic ground. She shuddered convulsively.

‘ _Well suited to my service._ ’

A tremor going through her, she bent to retrieve her weapon. Her white-knuckled fingers kept fumbling it.

‘ _Death has no meaning in my realm, once a soul is mine. I could gift you a body of sorts, flay it, and leave you skinless and bleeding for a decade or two, feeling every brush of phantasmagorial wind in agony. You do not yet know pain, mortal. I begin to be genuinely entertained, as I have not in a long time, by the anticipation of teaching you._ ’

She struggled to focus. The cave’s tunnels echoed with the last blasts of magic, of the melting of dripping ice spikes and the last forlorn clatter of the dishes and red-wet bones that had been set at the vampire’s table. She wanted to gasp _no_ but she couldn’t find the breath.

She _refused_. She hadn’t come this far and killed this much to bend now. Not even to a Daedric Prince. Pride and spite. Malyani tried to tell herself she’d suffered pain before, but even she wasn’t stupid enough to pretend comparisons could be made. What he even hinted at nauseated her with terror.

Her old teacher had once told her, in cold exasperation, _always yanking at the leash the instant you feel an inch of slack. You’ll strangle yourself to death before you tear the lead free, child._

Her teacher had been full of shit.

Sudden pain blazed in her shoulder, a twisting snake of fiery agony. She shrieked, shocking herself, and fell backward.

_Vampires_ , she thought furiously, _more vampires!_ She’d missed one of them, lurking in the passageways, and it had stabbed her through the shoulder. She clawed backward over her shoulder, writhing and groping for the spare knife at her thigh.

‘ _Well, my champion? Is this how you fall? So simply? I’m disappointed._ ’

The vampire twisted the blade, but this time she didn’t scream. She stabbed instead, slicing messily at the inside of their thigh, struggling to ignore the pain. The vampire flinched and she managed to yank away, summoning fire along the surface of her skin.

Molag Bal was laughing in the back of her mind. ‘ _Go on,_ ’ he said lazily. ‘ _This one I will give you, mortal. It will please me to watch._ ’

This vampire was not a master or a lord. Only hungry and angry and clever. Malyani blasted a firebolt into their leg from too close, singing her face and shattering their knees from force and fire. The vampire folded, screaming. Their hands reached for her, their magic slipping through her skin and sucking at her the way a knife slid through cream. But they were weak and in pain and their magic was uncertain. Malyani crawled up their body and sliced their throat open, listening to them gurgle and twitch as the last gush of blood left them.

In the aftermath she rested her head on the corpse’s chest, shaking. She had to remove the knife from her shoulder somehow, and before she could use a healing potion. She had to pick herself up, pick this cavern clean, and trudge back to Markarth.

But for the moment she shook and breathed, swallowing air imbued with dark alien power that belonged to no vampire down into her lungs.

Molag Bal’s laughter was fading softly, to a vibration up and down her spine like a cat’s purr. ‘ _Oh,_ ’ he said, ‘ _yes, I_ am _looking forward to this…_ ’


	2. Chapter 2

Malyani stood in the marketplace, water rushing past not far from her feet, and offered a handful of silver necklaces. Kerah regarded the tangle of chains politely but dubiously. “Bargain,” Malyani said. “I promise. They should be good quality.”

Kerah reached out and weighed one of the pendants in her hand. “They are tempting,” she said. “i don’t know how much I can offer, but if you’re really desperate to get them off your hands.”

“I am,” Malyani promised. Kerah nodded, satisfied.

“Then - “

‘ _You know what I love_ most _about you puny, crawling mortals?_ ’

Malyani jerked violently, startling Kerah and almost smacking the fistful of metal into the glass case of one of the displays. “Dragonborn?” Kerah asked, alarmed.

“I’m fine,” she choked.

‘ _How attached you are to your vices._ ’

The shock was still violent, but his voice wasn’t as overwhelming as it had been at first. Malyani proffered the necklaces again. “Offer whatever you think they’re worth of what you can spare,” she said. She was sick of carrying them around. She could ignore him. She could carry on a conversation as if his voice wasn’t deep in her ear.

‘ _Sometimes_ ,’ Molag Bal continued, ‘ _all one has to do is deprive you, and you all but break yourself._ ’

A tremor was running through her hands as she pulled a satchel out of the pack on her back. It was full of rings; the robbers in the gorge hadn’t had the opportunity to dump their stash in a while, but they’d kept killing.

‘ _For example. You, mortal. When was the last time you were fucked?_ ’

A white roaring noise filled her ears. She froze in the act of pulling her arm back over the counter, fingers hovering at its edge. Her breath had sucked harshly into her lungs and Kerah stared at her.

A grinding, pit-deep laugh shivered through the air. ‘ _How quickly what petty arrogance humans can muster crumbles._ ’

“Any idea what you might want to offer?” Malyani said through numb lips.

Of course she understood his areas of dominion. Of course she understood what Serana brusqely, obliquely referred to. But somehow - ah, fuck, Divines, somehow she _had_ relaxed and stayed relaxed, relegated a Daedric Prince to an omnipresent voice in her head whose presence inspired fear but not urgency. She’d endured the scorn of Daedric Princes before, and she’d comfortably shuffled this direct rebellion into the same slot, and in that pitch-thick, dark snarl was unmistakable pleasure. If it was a man’s voice, it would be the sound of a man confident of victory.

No. Once again, Molag Bal was terrorizing her. But if he could have affected her physically he would have torn her guts out by now, and any of his creatures he sent after her she could slaughter. She wouldn’t let him cow her.

‘ _Mortals_ ,’ his voice hissed, a sound that slid cold knives between her vertebrae and threatened to twist. ‘ _Always satisfied rutting like pigs. Don’t tell me_ you're _satisfied with that, little elf._ ’

Maylani bit into her tongue savagely, a tremor crawling down her spine. She was trying to keep her breathing even, but she knew her eyes had to be wide enough to show whites all around. She’d wondered before if some of the presence of the Daedric Prince in the air around her when he spoke was her own terror playing tricks on her, not because it seemed so real but because it abated at all. It was not abating now; it clung like a sticky-silky coat of tar, her skin acutely sensitive to the pressure of his voice against her.

Kerah picked apart one chain and peered down at the mass left over. “Two hundred septims,” she pronounced. “For the lot.”

‘ _Your paltry rebellions are perhaps merely the signs of a creature never brought correctly to heel. And I enjoy mixing mortal’s vices and fears. That moment when they can no longer tell pleasure apart from terror - that is the moment when I_ always _have them._ ’

“Gladly,” Malyani said, pretending a tremor hadn’t gone through her voice. The tone of the words was still conversational, but the pitch of the voice in her head - and no, it was _not_ drawing closer, only fear or perhaps a trick of his own was convincing her - lowered to an almost bestial, subterranean note.

Molag Bal chuckled in the back of her head. ‘ _And you, champion?_ '

She might have tried to answer him out loud if she'd understood the question, which was when she realized how distracted she was.

Kerah coughed. "Are you sure you're all right?"

Malyani jumped violently, jarring the bag of coins the merchant was trying to pass to her. Money scattered in chiming little arcs across Kerah's booth.

"I'm sorry!" she gasped. She licked her dry lips, feeling her stomach turn over. Molag Bal's laughter crawled up her spine like spider legs.

' _How long would it take to make you beg?_ ' He paused, as though savouring the thought. ' _You will beg for forgiveness,_ ' his voice intoned, vibrating in her fingertips as Kerah picked coins off the surface of the table and passed them back into the open bag. ' _You will_ beg _for your submission to be accepted. And you will beg for my attentions before very long at all._ '

Malyani managed to notice that Kerah had finished returning the gold before the pause stretched too long. She pulled the string tight and tucked the pouch away in her pack with a friendly nod. Kerah looked a little disturbed, but she returned the nod. Malyani turned and began to peruse the meat, desperate not to be alone.

' _Fool_ ', the Daedric Prince said in an almost generous tone. ' _I have despoiled wiser and more wary than you._ ' A pleased, uproarious laugh burst like thunder through her mind all at once, as he'd laughed when he bid her keep the house for his return. ' _And if you were wise,_ my champion _, you would never have followed the Vigilant here._ '

"Bloodiest beef in the reach," Hogni bellowed from far too close.

' _You_ will _be on your knees._ '

“You have any salt?” she asked, and as usual Hogni gave her as suspicious a glance as if she’d asked for the key to his home.

‘ _I anticipate the sight,_ ’ His voice crept into her head, inescapable and thick with cruel pleasure. Malyani shivered, feeling exposed in the chill air of a Markarth morning, surrounded by people she knew with a Daedric Prince whispering in her ear. The water rushed by behind her, a torrent of noise and distraction against the rough grey stone, and Molag Bal softly said, ‘ _I do not always favor a human body in this plane, but I would lower myself to shape one to put you on your knees and fuck your insolent mouth._.’

“Aye, a pinch or two,” Hogni grunted. “No haggling.”

Malyani stared at him, completely unable to remember what she’d asked him. She fisted her hand against her thigh until her nails bit into her palm and drew blood, swallowing convulsively, still feeling the reverberations of the last word trace up and down her spine.

‘ _You’ve spent far too long evading the place you should occupy in my service. I mean to correct this mistake. Now._ ’

It wasn’t possible, no matter how desperate she was to continue lying to herself, to disbelieve him. The words carved themselves into the air, maybe into the inside of her skull.

‘ _Perhaps not your mouth, not first. I could make you beg for that._ ’ A cruel, luxurious laugh. ‘ _Beg for whatever shape it pleased me to take. Mm. Instead, should I first bend you over and fuck that tight ass?_ ’

She drew in a sucking gasp. “What?” Malyani said, voice rough.

Hogni was eyeing her strangely. “The salt,” he said curtly. “You know the price.”

She’d get annoyed some other time. “I’ll buy what you have,” she said. Tremors were running through her in humiliatingly visible waves.

‘ _Perhaps here,_ ’ the hissing whispering continued. ‘ _Force you face down in front of them all. Though my altar slumbered in the heart of their city, I don’t believe there’s enough_ fear _here. It would do good to indulge a day in Markarth._ ’

Something was wrong. Something was - he’d never threatened her like this before, conversationally discussed inhabiting flesh in Tamriel. Malyani stared at what Hogni was offering until she forced herself to divine a number from it, and then she handed over the appropriate gold coins with unsteady fingers.

‘ _And you, my champion,_ ’ he purred. ‘ _I’m sure you’d be pleased to serve as an example._ ’

“What’s wrong with you?” Hogni asked, bemused

“Nothing,” she whispered through her teeth.

‘ _I like to see that honest fear._ ’ That voice was like a physical touch, sliding down her stomach and over her thighs. ‘ _But that’s not all, is it? Not just the realization of your own insignificance that has you quivering, mortal. Rutting like pigs, indeed. Is this the kind of thing_ you _imagine when groping in the hay? Your lord and master, shoving you down on that bloodied board and fucking you until you beg for something like mercy?_ ’

“Oh, you need a basket!” Hroki said, sympathetically. Malyani jerked violently around, startling them both. “Did you only plan for…selling…today?” The young woman’s words faltered as they blinked at each other and Malyani tried to offer a smile.

“Yes, that’s true,” she said, barely aware of what she was agreeing to. She jerked the salt from Hogni’s grasp. “I must go.”

‘ _Perhaps the mouth first after all,_ ’ Molag Bal reflected. ‘ _I’ll fuck your throat until you choke and weep, champion, and you’ll swallow everything it pleases me to give you. The mortal need for breath has always been an amusing way to make them dance on strings._ ’

She headed up the hill, not knowing where she was going but walking briskly and unable to face trying to duck past Kerah. There was nowhere to run in this city - no, she should have run for the inn, shoved a fistful of coins over the counter and hoped no noise carried in case - in case -

‘ _You cannot slay me and you cannot banish me,_ ’ the Daedric Prince said coldly. ‘ _What measure of complacency you took from the vampires and paltry daedra you killed, I will take away. And when I tire of you - and_ only _when I tire of you - will this be finished._

She staggered against the wall and shook her head, hard. In the middle of bright wintry daylight, she was deeply afraid. And despite the palpable malice in every word that slithered into her head, oh fuck, she was trembling and her nipples were hard and puckered under her chestplate.

' _You cannot run from_ me _, champion,_ ' Molag Bal promised. ' _But it would amuse me to see you try._ '

All she could think of was to find a door to close behind her. Gasping for breath, she took one step and then another. Cool metal slid under her fingers. She groped, pushed, and the door gave obligingly. No home to a citizen of Makarth, then. She had enough coherence left to be grateful - until she turned and took a few staggering steps into the room.

A low golden mist lingered in the abandoned house’s rooms. The empty space, the dishes laid out, the barrels standing still and the baskets knocked over all combined to make an eerie, noiseless picture until you strained your ears and caught a sinuous whisper of noise - wind, or faraway guttural voices, or shushing footsteps behind you.

She inhaled deeply. Everything was quiet. The intrusive voice had stopped. She didn't feel safe, but she rubbed her arms and tentatively allowed herself to feel reassured. He had just been scre - messing with the mortal's head, and now he was done for the day.

She waited for lightning to strike her and prove her wrong, and then she released a long breath. Malyani had propped a hip against one of the barrels and slumped and now she stood up, sweeping a wary eye over the room, and turned to reach for the door.

It didn't give.

Her stomach started freefall.

A rich, real, _physical_ laugh rolled over her skin. “Now this,” Molag Bal said from behind her, “I consider an invitation.”

Malyani spun. It wasn't a man - whatever stood there, it wasn't a man. Broad shoulders wrapped with muscle and bronze skin sloped down into a physically ideal, nude body but climbed up into the red wet skull of - something, long muzzle and bone and sharp teeth. Long, curving, deadly horns. Black eyes gleamed at her out of cobweb shadows and the rictus grin spread.

She flattened herself against the door, telling herself fiercely that if nothing else, she would not scream.

“Dragonborn,” the lipless mouth said, Molag Bal’s voice emerging deep and grinding and almost jovial from the monstrous jaws. “Come enjoy your reward.”

Malyani thought - _my knife_ \- but it was no use, even if she forced him to kill her he’d have her soul. She was trapped - and it wasn’t surprise that filled her, but it was shock.

She backed away again and her shoulders hit the door in a second. The tall shape paced toward her until she could see the reflections dancing off every inch of its naked skull. She was so busy staring into the hollows where its eyes had been that she almost didn’t see the hand that lashed out until it was wrapped around her throat.

She gasped convulsively, up on her toes. The rush of fear and exhilaration was frighteningly intense. Her hands groped helplessly against the thick wrist that held her up, her grey skin blurring against the shadows of the house and the darkling glow of his flesh.

The red skull bent towards her as if for a kiss and Malyani fought harder and harder to strangle the scream in her throat. And then, at the last moment, flesh flowed up over it; red muscle and veins and then skin, so mercifully swift that she didn’t have a chance to close her eyes.

Then he kissed her.

She couldn’t make sense of it for a minute. It was a - it was a normal kiss, someone’s warm skin on yours, the gentle movements of a questing mouth. Her head was light because she couldn’t breathe, and she felt hot and trembling because of adrenaline but the illusion was almost complete.

And then Molag Bal’s mouth parted against hers. He licked her mouth and it opened, she not thinking clearly enough to stop him, and then he pushed his long tongue into her mouth. A long, hot tongue invaded her mouth, curling around her own, His hand was an iron bar around her throat, but not bruising yet.

The dark room pressed in around her like a thousand hands. Malyani made a small, humiliatingly desperate sound.

Their mouths parted with a wet, deep sound. Malyani thought: _your heart is pounding. Your hands are shaking. This is fear. This is fear, isn’t it?_

Not for the first time, she thought, _I have his attention now._


	3. Chapter 3

She felt like her heart was going to pulse out of the front of her ribcage - she felt hot, trembling inside of her own skin. The Daedric Prince of Domination smiled, white teeth showing in a still-inhuman face, and said, “ah, yes. Skin better for this.”

When he’d closed her in a cage like a close clawed hand the first time and laughed at her, voice like a physical hand dragging down her spine, she’d dug her nails into the iron and shook. She’d taken his weapon in her hands and killed a man with it, shoulders burning as she brought it raking down over - and over - and over again -

All while his laughter rippled over her skin, scalding and triumphant, and the air at his altar closed in around her body. And it was fear and more. It was intoxicating, being his instrument, a shameful sense of borrowed power that rain through the veins like finely distilled mead. You shouldn’t - you couldn’t - get off to the memory of a Daedric Prince’s voice stuck between your temples like he’d sunk claws into your head.

She was shaking.

Between those strong white teeth slid a long red tongue. Malyani stared at its forked tip, her head jerking back almost against the wall. His clawed, heavy hand slid down her neck and she sucked in a messy free breath, almost coughing.

The respite was brief. Fire slammed into her; she almost screamed before she realized she wasn’t burning, and then did cry out - choked and abrupt - when she realized her armour was. The leather straps disintegrated. The paint bubbled. And then the metal heated and heated until it slid liquid over her skin and hit the ground.

She stood absolutely frozen, terrified of moving and disturbing Molag Bal’s amusement in keeping the armour from charring her feet to the bone. Her eyes were so fixed on the ground she didn’t even think about her nudity until one coarse hand slipped down and covered her breast.

She gasped and jumped, a riot of responses running through her. Molten metal was littered around her feet and a subtle throb of pressure still lingered at her throat and she had no idea how to survive this -

At first the touch was almost analytical, as if he measured her mortal flesh and found her wanting. The hand, a little too raw and lean and _long_ for human, grazed her skin. It moved down; it followed the line of her body. The air in the abandoned house beat with the stillness like a giant meaty heart and Malyani felt a howl building in her throat just to do _something_ , to react. But then the long fingers closed over her breast and squeezed, and his shadow coated her skin. Molag Bal loomed closer and he hissed, “no clever defiance any longer?”

Vicious laughter whispered in his voice, but idle disappointment as well.

She wanted to run. There was nowhere to run. He wanted to see the fight in her so he could break it, but she wasn't sure there was any left. It was drowned out by the panicked rabbit-drum of her heart in her chest. All she could see was the dark tunnel down to the altar in her mind's eye. All she could hear was his laughter, sifting up from the cold stone ground instead of out of the body's mouth.

Heavy, broad palms hit her shoulders. He was pressing her down onto her knees. She gasped in an audible breath, _feeling_ the heat of his skin increase against her cheek. For a brief moment she felt mercifully dissociated as threat finally, finally became reality.

And then her knees hit the ground and there was no such thing as mercy.

Her eyes rolled up to him, seeing the horned silhouette cut against the murky light. He bent his head toward her and a shudder ripped through her body. Her knees scraped on the ground and she thought _what, what is this, it is_ not _desire_ in desperation because a sharp clawed hand was in her hair and it _tugged_.

"Open your mouth." The smoky whisper slid into the shadows of the room and over her skin.

Her lips parted. Trapped she thought a thousand things - _fuck_ , and _if I twist right leave hair in his grasp and run_ -

There was nowhere to run but down into the bowels of the earth, where he would follow her, where he'd find her and take what he wanted. She had a flash of an image, painfully strong, of being bent over that desolate black altar and fucked, of the cock she hadn't yet seen but presumed he'd constructed spreading her open and sliding so, so deep inside -

"Open your mouth, my champion," Molag Bal ordered. His hand landed on her jaw, heavy and hot. It didn't exert any pressure and her stomach fell and fell and fell because her mouth opened, her jaw fell, and when the heavy head of his cock brushed across her lower lip and claws drew along her jaw she made a terrible gasping animal sound and there was horrible desire in the sound.

He thrust into her mouth.

She almost choked on him. It was unreal, how familiar and unfamiliar the sensation was. Her mouth filled with hot, solid flesh, the taste of musk and something strange, something dark and coppery like blood. Malyani clawed at his thighs and drowned in it, but she responded. He laughed, fist tightening in her hair, and said, "suck."

She closed her lips around him, shuddering, and obeyed.

Silky flesh filled her mouth and his smoky smell filled her nose. Malyani swallowed around him, her tongue sliding against his flesh, trying to find a rhythm. The weight of his hand on her head remained constant and it was a struggle to breath. Her scraping nails turned into clutching hands and she gripped his thighs to keep herself up, sweating palms skidding across heated velvety skin that wrapped across the thick, sleek swell of muscle.

He pushed with his hips and she struggled to accommodate him. Molag Bal was languorously fucking her mouth, his heavy cock sliding over her tongue, and she burned as she heard the choked, wet little whimpers that came out of her as she struggled for breath.

He felt huge in her mouth, making her struggle to wrap her lips around him, and she knew her mouth wasn't going to be all he was satisfied with. Her body burned hot, not cold. She clenched her thighs together but it didn't help the ripples of heat, and this wasn't right - his laughter in her ear over the vampire's corpse melded into his promises to fuck her right in front of every citizen of Markarth on the streets and she couldn't tell them apart, that fear and that desperate arousal. She was going to be an easy mark if terror and lust mingling were how he broke mortals.

Long clawed fingers combed through her hair. His grip had gentled, which frightened her more than the harshness had. "Getting wet for me?" The pure, cold arrogance in his voice rang off the furniture and whispered up under her feet - and then vibrated like a glancing touch up her thighs and between. Malyani arched up off her floor in shock, jerking her hips up, and the motion and a snap of his hips slid him down her throat. She choked frantically, his grip on her hair clamping down painfully again, and now the sensation was as if chilly fingers slid firmly from her mound across her sex all the way to her ass.

They pressed there insistently, her own moisture smeared across her skin. She couldn't pull away, could barely move at all, and he pushed himself so deep into her throat she spasmed for air. Malyani's vision almost dimmed from panic and need, and then he was pulling away and letting her gulp air while the heavy tip traced across her lips.

Suddenly he was crouched in front of her - lowering himself to her level, touchable and peering at her. In the shadows of his inhuman face his wide eyes glittered somehow with inchoate light, though they looked pitch black and hollow. Malyani tried to scrabble backwards and he laughed, cruel, and slapped her onto the ground with a casual hand.

"Oh, the fight's not out of you," Molag Bal hissed, amused. "But it pleases me to accept your body's submission, and your fear. Is it just sucking my cock that made you so wet, champion? Dripping and whimpering like a begging dog? Or were you imagining what else I would use it for?"

"No," Malyani said desperately, realizing with horror that it had technically been both. His hands settled on her hips and he dragged her lower body slowly, unhurriedly forwards.

His claws sank into her suddenly - deep and bloody and hot, making her scream. "The hubris of man and mer," his voice said, curling deeper than before out from between frozen jaws, a grating snarl like the first crack of an avalanche. "Do not _lie_ to me again, Malyani. When your Prince is here in the flesh I will have the truth from your tongue or I will take it."

It was the first time Molag Bal had used her name. Somehow it made it all the more real - it was _her_ he'd threatened, her he'd hunted, and her he was going to fuck instead of some fleeting human who'd made the mistake of dismissing his dominion. Her name made her an ant under a spyglass instead of an ant lost in a swarming hill under a faraway eye.

His massive horned head lowered to sniff at her throat, and then her breasts. Hot breath blew across her skin and in the dark her nipples tightened. Her stomach muscles jumped involuntarily. Malyani's whole body was trembling and sweat slicked and if only she could see him, could catch more than the small movements and shifts in shadows -

No, it would not make it better.

"You will answer me," Molag Bal growled.

She scrambled to recall the question - and then shrank from it, in horror. She shook her head wildly, hair whipping her face, and his laugh boomed from wall to wall. His claws pulled out of her hips, making her jerk, and then he licked her with that forked red tongue, reaching her belly and then up to her throat. The hot swipe refocused her entire mind on where the puff of his breath fell next.

Then he wrapped his tongue around her breast, the forked tip flicking her nipple, and sucked hard. Her flesh was tugged into his wide, wet mouth and Malyani flailed and tried to pull up, tried to kick, making desperate wounded sounds that weren't wounded at all.

"Answer me," the Daedric Prince whispered, pleased with her hysteria, and Malyani sobbed, "both! Both, oh, gods, both, please - "

He dropped her with a bark of laughter. "You do begin to please me, mortal," he said. "More than you realize." And then his claws were back against her hips. She flinched, her muscles tensing violently in preparation for more pain, but his hands merely gripped her hips and ass with the lightest taunting prickle.

"You please me well," he repeated, and then laughed maliciously. "But I think you'd be more grateful if I broke you with pain."

He lifted her lower body up off the ground. Her hands scraped out from under her and her head bounced off the ground, and when he pressed that wide sharp mouth to her sex and pushed the long coiling muscle of his tongue straight into her the only reason she didn't scream again was because her throat had simply ceased to work.

The sound of him pushing into her was thick and wet in her ears. He spread her open, opening slick and swollen tissue, and _curled_ inside of her. The obscene noise of it and the terrifying intensity of the sensation of him inside her dug under her fingernails and crawled into her veins. She fought then, her lost defiance recovered in a frenzy of panic and filthy ecstasy.

It was hard to fight something that had its head between your legs. Her mind not coherent enough to warn her against it, she clawed at the fingers gripping her hips, trying to pull her legs up to kick at his head, his shoulders, to get purchase with her heels against the horns that curved back from his skull.

It was a mistake. She pulled her legs up and his jaw angled up with them. His tongue plunged deeper still, curling thickly and opening her further. Her heartbeat jumped, her mind skipped, and she bunched in on herself with a panting, helpless whine. She couldn't even tell if it was pleasure or just lightning anymore.

Even muffled by her flesh, she knew he laughed.

She ripped her hands away from the long, bony fingers gripping her before she gripped them right back. Her palms slapped wetly down on the stone and she ground her knuckles into it, trying to anchor herself in the grating pain. It was no use; there was nothing that could drown out Molag Bal fucking her with his tongue, fingers flexing against her hips and claws drawing new shallow lines of blood each time.

Her whole body throbbed, sweat painting across her skin. Malyani was gasping open mouthed; she couldn't get enough air into her lungs. The flat front of those sharp white teeth rubbed against her clit and she convulsed, making a shrill and desperate sound. The world was composed of snapshots of shadow and sound - the _noises_ , the ceiling looming over her, and the damned mist clinging to their skin. He held her with cruel casualty and utter control, dangling her off the ground, and Malyani -

He gripped her thigh in one massive hand, shifting, and pulled her open until her hip twinged. Her high, desperate gasp rang in her ears. The savage mouth sucked messily at her and he fucked into her once, twice more with his tongue before she came so hard her vision shattered into black shadows and too-bright lights on the inside of her eyelids.

He let her slide to the floor. Muscles watery and copper on her tongue, Malyani stared upwards, trembling, and watched that red forked tongue swipe over his lips.

"You've been mine since you led that little priest back into _my_ house." The voice filling the room was almost conversational. "You spilled his blood across _my_ altar - " He paused, and the guttural laughter that rolled out of his jaws was rich with low satisfaction, at the sex or the memory of blood and gore, she didn't know. " - and you took my weapon."

He stooped, leisurely, over her. "You have been mine since you drew breath in these rooms," that satisfied, faraway voice intoned. "I merely make the point."

She was raw and cored out and shaking, feeling seared on the inside of her skin from the force of her climax. She didn't know where it came from, but she found the strength to shake her head.

His shape straightened away from her again. "You should enjoy my leniency. Any other subject whose defiance did not entertain me so would be suffering the consequences of that little obstinacy." A booming, malicious laugh filled the next pause. "You may yet, when I tire of this."

The blood beat sluggishly through her veins from terror, but she remained silent.

Molag Bal rose and rose until he towered over her even more than before. "Rise, Dragonborn. On your feet - I have more yet planned for you."

Somehow the moist air on her skin as she struggled to her feet, legs shaky a new lamb's, made her more naked than her ruined armour. She burned as he observed her fight to obey his command.

When she was finally standing and swaying, her own fluids drying cold on her thighs, he reached leisurely out and fisted a hand in her hair, dragging her head back. A panicky gasp burst out of her, but when her hands flew up instinctively as if to grab his wrist and alleviate his grasp, the air changed. A cold weight, subtle and present, and she knew at once it was his disapproval. He was warning her.

And when she realized that, she froze again. Every time she had tasted a change in the atmosphere, air pressure against her skin, the night sky bending down. It had been real.

She'd been feeling him on her skin the entire time.

His fingertips - no, claw tips - spidered red lines of subtle pain against her cheek. In between one breath and the next heat burgeoned in her stomach anew, just from that helpless flicker of pain. It was wrong and raw to feel this way, but she'd never felt anything more strongly in her life. Her neck arched back under the pressure of his fingers.

"That's better," he said, voice a feather-soft snarl on her skin. His fingers flexed casually in her hair - reminded her he could rip a fistful out, throw her across the room, tear her jaw off at a whim. "You've been resilient, which is pleasing enough in a champion, but it is time to bow."

She would have defied him, but she knew the defiance would have buckled under the first press, and that would be more humiliating than simple silence. Her tongue wet her lips; his strange body's long fingers closed on her jaw and he lifted her to him.

They swallowed the small sound she made between them. She stumbled back under his direction, one massive hand in her hair and the other spread over her hip, massaging the flesh. She drowned in the kiss, which was hard and dark and deep, his long tongue in her mouth and his teeth prickling at her skin when she moved wrong because she _was_ , she was moving, he positioned her like a ragdoll but against her mind's dominion her hips shifted and her hands pawed at his arms through a swelter of fear.

A gasp tore free of her when her backside hit the table. She ripped her mouth away and he permitted it, the heat of his tongue moving lazily to her jaw and throat instead.

He didn't need to contradict that last defiant shake of her head, because Malyani was doing it for him. Every gulping inward breath betrayed her with a lift of her waist and a tiny, raw sound wrenching out of her throat.

Her back smacked the table and drove the breath from her lungs. A glance upward showed a horned, imperious silhouette cut from nightmares, and when Malyani would have struggled his hands fell on her body. Terrifingly they were ghost-light but made her freeze anyway; long claws slid along her ribs. The bent head inspected her body, rolling the swell of her breasts, the skin on her hips marked faintly from the long press of armour, her thighs rounded with muscle. In the dim light her skin looked a much darker grey than usual, and she felt an unnatural spooked restlessness come crawling up her throat again. He was just _looking_ at her, eyes consuming the sight at a leisurely pace, and the message couldn't have been clearer: _I can do whatever the fuck I want to you, whenever I want to._

She tried to steady her breathing, though perhaps hyperventilating and passing out would have been a mercy.

"I saw this," Molag Bal mused aloud, making her jump badly. The deceptively delicately point of one razor sharp claw - had he unsheathed them further, or morphed his hands, she couldn't tell oh god - traced a long pinkish scar along her belly. "I watched you bleed out on the snow." A pleased smile lurked in the deep voice. "Clutching your guts to keep them inside you and crawling for your potions." He laughed and she jumped again, wanting to shove his hands away, her unease budding into proper terror at his words.

Then suddenly he stooped towards her. "I enjoy that about you, champion," he hissed from far too close, hot breath on her skin. "Just when one thinks the job is done, there you are wriggling out of the mud again, ready to be crushed anew."

The air was black soup in her lungs. She was no longer stunned from impact from the table but still Malyani struggled to breathe until her frustrated mounted into dizziness. The single razored claw bit almost tenderly into her skin, drawing a slow embrous line of traitorous sensation down along the edge of her scar, then veering to her hip.

"And here," he said. His hand moved, and Malyani tracked it as desperately as if the heat he gave off was a touch of its own, grazing her belly. His claws settled at her shoulder, where a badly-dodged mace had raked chunked of her flesh free. Molag Bal bent his head and sniffed her skin, the air snorting through his broad chest as though a massive beast crouched above her. "This, I did not witness," he growled.

Something hot brushed the inside of her thigh. He reared back, gripped her leg and hauled it up. Her world winnowed down to only his hard hand on her calf, the air brushing along her opened sex, and the _awareness_ of his cock between her legs. It took a second of her heartbeat pounding to realize he inspected the scars from a bear trap on her leg.

"You've been trapped before," he said. It was maddening, all of this. She thought she'd given up, somewhere deep inside, but tension uncoiled up her spine with every word. The warmth radiated from him, or maybe from the table at her back, but it muddied her thoughts. "A less professional methodology. Did the bone break, splinter?"

Malyani twitched. A heavy hand landed between her breasts. She realized he expected her to _answer_. Her mouth was resoundingly dry, her throat empty.

"No," she croaked.

"How did you kill them?"

"Fire."

A roar of laughter jarred the room. "Yesss," his voice hissed from above her, and she realized that the respite was over an instant before he pulled her sweat-slick body right off the table in his hands. "You do like to watch them burn."

Her body fell against his in one long, overwhelming slide of naked skin. Malyani writhed without thinking, trying to catch purchase on _anything_ but dangling helpless instead and, she realized with a plunge of her stomach, suspended by his clawed hands above his cock.

Malyani slid down through his hands and the thick head opened her up.

How did a mortal feel this much and still survive? Molag Bal's heavy clawed hands held her like a ragdoll. It was too much, the thick burning stretch dizzying as he spread her open and sank her down by inches. She felt - helpless, obscenely helpless, her feet dangling futilely. Her head lolled back without her conscious permission.

Some fetal prey instinct told her his eyes were heavy on her skin. Where else would he be looking, logic told her, but the blood pulsing through her whispered different priorities. It whispered of her bared throat, soft breasts, tender belly that his claws pressed gently into. Of the raw, bitten lips that his sharp teeth hovered over.

Oh, fuck, gods, he sank so deep.

Malyani whimpered, heard the small lost sound fall into the thick darkness of the room. It was a small, vulnerable, begging sound. A dark low laugh crawled out of Molag Bal's chest, the vibrations running up and down her skin.

She was impaled, slick and trembling, her skin wet with sweat and the pulse of his Daedric blood thrumming along the cock buried inside of her and filling her entire body until her own heart stuttered to keep rhythm. His claws were pricking her thighs again but she couldn't parse the pain from the pleasure any more than she could parse her throbbing clit from the deep aching stretch of penetration. Or maybe she could tell pleasure from pain, it just didn't _matter_ which was which - either way, his taunting threat had come true and he had paused.

She trembled so badly her hips slipped, and her body instinctively tried to clench around him when it had almost no give left. It almost tipped her head over heels into another burning orgasm, but the very extremity of sensation kept her poised on the edge - just shaking, making small anguished noises into a room bereft of all noise but her heaving breaths and the distant brush of wind, as if Molag Bal could wait for a millenia simply enjoying the sight of Malyani bringing herself to her own doom.

"Are you satisfied, mortal?"

She moaned raggedly.

"Do you submit, mortal?"

Perhaps resistance was futile. To admit it - to reach out, to show open defeat - was still a crawling horror. Perhaps Molag Bal could do anything to you without your submission that he could with it. His voice oozed like black tar between her vertebrae and she didn't know if the threat humming in the air or his body now slightly rocking in hers was pulling her apart more effectively.

Molag Bal laughed again. It was an exquisitely cruel sound. "Oh, how you want to be free. And oh how you want your pleasure to come to fruition." Her hands slapped with no sense of self preservation onto the thickly muscled biceps supporting her. Giant clawed hands cupped her ass, spread her, and began dragging her up his cock again. "Your pleasure is mine," he said in a matter-of-fact growl. "Your terror is mine. Your life, and this mortal shell of a body, shall be mine soon enough."

And then, seemingly satisfied that his threats had perhaps finally imprinted themselves into her reluctant mind, he straightened fully and started moving in earnest.

This time she clung to the monster inside of her, feeling the furnace heat of his skin. She didn't want to, but her legs hung loose, and the animal pit of her brain needed to grasp something to keep herself from losing herself in panic.

If she lost herself now she'd start screaming and never stop, frothing mad as a prophet of Sheogorath. Malyani didn't think Molag Bal would bear the tedium of that for long. He'd fuck her and snap her neck like a rabbit's - maybe not in that order.

Her thoughts splintered violently at the next sharp thrust. The steady rhythm of penetration grew harsher and more intense, the slap of warm skin against her inescapable. The whispers in the mist seemed to grow oh so slowly but steadily louder until they crept at the edges of her skin and mind.

Panting - making unshaped sounds desperately close to mewling - she forced her head up and forced herself to meet his gaze. Her eyes felt stretched impossibly wide with coltish panic. "Molag - Bal - " she choked.

His great dark head bowed toward her. She could think of any number of words that might please or at least satisfy him to hear. _My lord, I beg of you, please._ They all tightened in her gut like a hot fist, like she _wanted_ him to be satisfied -

Malyani squeezed her eyes shut. Molag Bal peered down at her - she saw between her eyelashes - and his hands were heavy on her body, still so heavy and firm and inescapable. She shouldn't grasp or claw at him. She might anger him, or she might make her need too obvious - except how could it be more obvious. He pushed into her again, his cock beginning to move more easily in her, slick and slow. A harsh, bloody fuck on her knees would have been more merciful. Would have been _kinder_. The absurdity of that thought made her moan and Molag Bal's amusement beat against her skin in time with her heart, because he was holding onto her still and now moving her more quickly.

He tugged at her. The friction was surreal, how he held her open and plunged deep, the tug at her, the tight small throb of clit and nipples and heartbeat behind her ribs and even her _mouth_ , scored and raw and tender. Like a body throbbing with sensation and strung together only by the places he'd touched and sliced and laid claim to.

He thrust suddenly, deeper than ever before. He was so thick and high in her it was as if she felt him in her throat. Her head jerked back, her hands spasmed - Malyani found herself thrashing. Every kick of her legs squirmed her against his cock, rocked him impossibly deeper. _Stop, stop_ , she was only making it worse but _fuck_.

She realized she'd scored the flesh of his chest with her nails and tried to snatch her hands back with hazy terror.

"Mortal, I have given you your reward." He was laughing at her, amused and malicious. _Knowing._ Mocking her. "You may enjoy it."

"I don't - " she said, shattered, barely knowing what words left her mouth.

And he pulled free of her.

She was hollow and slick and gasping, her toes pointing desperately for the floor, her mind wiped clean with shock. The world moved around her; Molag Bal was carrying her, moving her, and she couldn't reorient herself.

"You don't what? Don't enjoy this?"

 _Liar_ , the bloodbeat of her veins whispered. _Liar, liar, liar._

She knew it didn't matter how many times he coaxed a slick and trembling orgasm out of her body, it wouldn't make this situation any less obscene. She knew the rush of terrified relief each time the claws didn't sink in dragged her further and further into his grasp. The idea that she would be in a situation where she was grateful to merely be violated by a Daedric Prince instead of spitted was one she wouldn't have thought to entertain nightmares of before she entered Skyrim.

But she was lost to it now.

He dropped her on her feet. Malyani scrambled for balance and the weight of the inhuman body fell against her back, driving her into the wall. One hot thigh slid between her legs, opening her helplessly. The fat, silky head of his cock slipped against her again, brushing like a tease against her sex.

"Finish your thought, Malyani." Molag Bal, Prince of Rape and Domination, ordered. He must have divined the flinch under her skin when he first spoke her name and he used it against her now.

He was grinding her down, and every time her mind failed her a little more. She knew what truth he intended to prise out of her, and the sick twist of heat in her gut wondered what he'd do to wrest it out of her. He'd cut her, but only like a tease. He'd fucked her, but he'd gotten her slick and wild first. It was terrifying, waiting for the knife edge to roll and cut her open feet and throat at once, but if she satisfied him -

Her mind was racing. She was a rat in a trap and she couldn't stop herself. A Daedric Prince was slaking himself on her flesh, and the thought was as surreal as the realization that there was no waiting it out, there was no seizing her moment and a knife and triumphing, and there might not even be relief in surrender.

A low, cool laugh slipped into her ears. "How desperately I can see your mind working," he observed. Long, clawed fingers spread over her belly. She slapped her palms down against the stone wall, panicking, and her hips were tipping backwards. For a second he slid against her again like a _taunt_ , and then razored claws sank into her hips and he plunged into her again.

"But you still haven't answered the question."

And then, suddenly, his mouth closed over the juncture at shoulder and neck. Malyani went rigid; his teeth punctured her skin in a ring of hot sharp pains. For a long breathless second she knew, the way she knew her own name, that she was going to die right there and then.

"If you defy me, I will break you. If you submit to me, I will possess you. For how you've pleased me, you may make your choice once more. But do it quickly or I will choose for you. And I..." Each word resonated in her ears, not garbled in the slightest by her flesh under his teeth. A slow, thick slide into her. Claws tickled through the hair stuck damply to the back of her neck, then dragged deep and slow down her back. "Will choose pain."

She could feel blood welling hotly from the wound. Malyani closed her eyes. In the pressure of the moment she felt everything - the brush of her eyelashes, the uneven rock under her palms, the silky tug of skin as her legs were pushed wider to welcome the push of his hips.

The weight of the next second threatened to crush her lungs. He moved in her, hips snaking against her ass, voice lingering in her head. The air rippled against her skin and the surreality of it slid her voice out of her throat in a thankfully thoughtless gasp. "I don't want you to stop," she choked.

"Beg."

Malyani squeezed her eyes shut. "Please," she said. Her tongue was thick in her mouth. He moved in her, slow and intoxicating, the blood on her back and his teeth in her neck spidering red lines of pain to confuse the pleasure, to spike the ecstasy. "Please don't stop - "

' _You can beg better than that._ '

She gave a strangled cry as he jerked his hips up against her, opening her wide and deep again, threatening to dizzy her. "Please," she hissed. At first the words were foul on her tongue and she wanted to wildly rebel, but then they slipped out _too_ easily - frightening her, absorbing her, entrapping her. "My lord, please, I beg of you, _please_ , don't stop, take what you want from me, allow me to serve you - " And then, whispered, hissed between her teeth, " - fuck me, please - "

She was caught _now_ on the knife's edge of hating the words and yet feeling them wrench deep in her gut with dark pleasure. And _would they please him_ and _would they please him ENOUGH_. And the dark and coiling pressure of his power at her back. He wiped out the entire world. Nothing could protect her, and nothing could stop him.

She was frozen, hands ground into the stone. His jaw flexed, deepening the bite, smearing blood between his long misshapen mouth and her shoulder.

And then, finally, a pitch-deep breath of laughter tracing along her skin. ' _Acceptable_ ,' he whispered in her head. Cold ghost-hands closed over her breasts and knees and ankles, fisted in her hair, and then she was dragged painfully off her feet and into the air.

' _I believe we can begin._ '


	4. Chapter 4

A fist in her hair pulled her neck back into a vulnerable arch. Malyani didn't even know if it was a real hand any more - or, perhaps, whether the flesh and blood hand was any realer than the phantoms of dark power that raked along every other free inch of her skin.

She was tightly bunched against his body, and _now_ he fucked her properly.

Large, clawed, physical hands clasped her at the back of her thighs and yanked her knees up to her chest. Malyani snarled and curled in, a noise that ripped out of her mouth and left her throat raw. The angle meant he plunged deeper, birthing a rhythm fit to destroy her mind. She was suspended in his impossibly strong grip, his hips bucking up into her and a low snarling laugh stirring her hair as she gasped.

And as he fucked her all the ghostly, icy hands crawling over her skin tugged and raked at her. Fingers she couldn't see plucked at her nipples and traced claws lightly over her ribs. Cool fingers stroked her clit and she writhed as a garbled noise burst from her throat. They drew their touch along the lips of her sex as he moved in and out of her, touching him and touching her, smoothing chilly palms along the sweat-slick inside of her thighs. They pressed at her ankles and knees and hips and ass until she was impossibly open, and vulnerable. His hot mouth worked on her throat, sucking at the flesh in his sharp-toothed grip, and a phantom hand squeezed at her breast.

His flesh hands left her legs. She had only enough time to fear where they went, and then she _knew_ , and if her arousal was any less feverish it would have gone cold and dampened in an instant.

Because he pushed those claws _into_ her, neatly between her ribs.

The first flash of pain was nauseating. Molag Bal must have dampened the sensation after that. Or changed her flesh to match, or any fistful of terrifying Daedric witchery she was malleable in front of. After leaving her with that frightening memory, he gave her only a dull horrible pierced sensation, a needle pressure against her physical frantically pumping heart.

"No - " She realized she could reach new heights of fear, despite everything. She _did not want to die._

Molag Bal inhaled deeply, as if savouring the fresh spike of desperation. His rhythm slowed. His jaws parted and released the flesh they held trapped, and he said in a calm voice, "show me your need."

It took her only a split second to understand what he desired. After that there remained only mustering the bravado to do it. She had to shift - pointing her toes for the ground and extending her legs, groping behind her for his shoulders and then cringing and whimpering when his fingers shifted inside the meat of her torso. The phantom hands dissipated, but the movement still rocked her on his cock. She could hear the wet sound it made as her hips shifted back and then forward, easing him deeper.

Molag Bal laughed, deep and resonating. One muscular arm circled in front of her.

She gripped his forearm, her hands blanch-knuckled. Malyani could hear her own breath echoing as gulping sobs in the room. Muscles in her thighs trembling, she pushed herself up, then let herself sink down. He was so much larger he must have been crouched, but he remained perfectly still, as if she was fucking herself on a rock.

The fingers embedded between her ribs followed her movements. But the sensation was only just blunted enough to keep her from completely panicking. She could still _feel_ his hand in her torso.

The thing that frightened her most was how little it did to dampen the fever pitch of her arousal.

Up, and down. Up, and then down.

She couldn't even edge towards complacency. Her hand slipped once in the sweat she was spreading on his arm, and the prickle sharpened. Malyani wondered desperately if she was going to die. Even if the pain was dampened, was more damage being done internally by the second? Were his fingers half-substantial, was the flesh being healed? She remembered the promise he'd made, _only when I tire of you_ , and wondered if he was already finished.

He hadn't needed pain, after all, to drive her to the very frantic edge of ultimate terror and adrenaline.

She whimpered as her ankles involuntarily flexed under her weight. It brought her down harder on him, her body curving like a bow to take him. He pressed up inside of her, rubbing and sliding and - his skin, his body, it was slick when her ass pressed back against him. She knew it was _her_ slick, painting him despite the position he held her in, and she made an agonized noise of need.

"Better," he said. His chuckle filled the room. "You may come, champion."

It hit her as if her body, unbeknownst to her, had been waiting eagerly for his command. Climax ripped through her like white lightning over the plain, crackling beneath every inch of her skin. The orgasm was so strong she almost convulsed. Her feet cramped as her body jerked up onto the utmost possible height of her toes, head falling back and body curling carelessly until her head hit his chest. The ghost hands were squeezing her breasts again, now almost cruelly, but it only strung out the orgasm. His free, warm, heavy hand - the arm she had been leaning on - dropped to roughly finger her clit.

She was jerking like a puppet on strings.

Malyani was barely aware when two hands clasped her by the waist and lifted her easily off his cock. She shivered, a low moan escaping her as her body clenched emptily around the absence of him. She'd learned to keep him in her, to give to his presence, and it terrified her that she felt hollow without him.

He let her slide down. She flung out a hand, scraping skin off against the rough wall, and was on her knees in front of him again, looking up, seeing his cock glistening in front of her face.

"Finish the task you abandoned," Molag Bal growled. His figure stretched above her, impossibly tall, black spectral shadow distorted against the ceiling. It didn't matter that his figure was sinister, that his shadow was alien. Even the simulacrum of flesh was innocuous in the face of his power breathing through the room.

Malyani shuddered, hard, and reached for him before he could remind her.

She was rising onto her knees, opening her mouth, clutching at his thighs. He allowed the grip, just as he allowed her small desperate sound when he pushed past her lips and into her mouth. The taste of him was almost becoming familiar now. She sucked at him, messy and wet, as he filled her entire world.

Her eyes had closed without her conscious direction. A hand landed heavy on her head, cruel fingers combing idly through her tangled hair. He tugged her closer, now needing no more than that casual gesture to have her surging to obey him and take him into her throat. Despite her responsiveness she struggled at the first long thrust, her body spasming, but she forced herself to calm, gagging and panting around the length of his flesh. She had no other choice, and he allowed her the moments it took; she knew he must be enjoying the sight of her fighting her own body to please him.

' _You'll take my seed,_ ' his voice whispered in her head. ' _Now, another night, you'll take it into your body. Perhaps I'll have you heavy with abominations, Malyani, creatures of your defiance and my power to populate and rip into this wretched city or even to tear into my enemies._

She could feel a scream bubbling up. Her compliance, born of mingled fear and dirty pleasure, threatened to splinter under that thought. _Could_ she be seeded by a creature such as he? The idea bit at her, but her mouth kept working.

With a mortal she might have done a job with more finesse. Involved her hands on his balls, deft strokes of her tongue, targeting and lingering the most sensitive spots. But on her knees before Molag Bal she needed her hands to keep herself upright,and she could only lick and suck the hot heady flesh in her mouth and try to breathe around him. He was no longer allowing her even the pretense of setting a rhythm, only fucking her mouth. His pace varied between brutal and languid, but it was beginning to settle into harder, faster thrusts.

The insubstantial touches were back. They traced down her spine, and again up the insides of her thighs. They didn't stop there this time. A few taunting touches against her empty, still-slick sex and then they drifted backwards.

She knew better than to try to escape this time when the first ghost fingers pushed into her ass, but she twisted. No amount of discipline or caution could have prevented her hands from turning clawlike against his legs or completely silence the muffled whimper she gave. He fucked her throat and fingered her ass open, cool fingers of - magic? shadow? phantom? - opening her and working inside.

Her skin didn't tear, at least, eased by the wetness dragged from her sex. The obscenity of Molag Bal's parody of care was torture in of itself. Her ribs throbbed hollowly; reminded of the moments past, she slipped one hand from his thigh amidst the welter of sensation to touch her sides. She felt no wetness but sweat and no torn flesh, and she shuddered in painful relief. He left her to the reality of her own pleasure. Her own _desire._

His hand clenched in her hair. A shriek was choked in her throat as he thrust deep into her mouth and held her there.

' _Swallow,_ ' Molag Bal hissed. Hot liquid pulsed into her mouth. She struggled to swallow, not to choke, and as her throat worked a third finger pried into her ass. She didn't know how long her reality strung between those two sensations, but her body was twitching helplessly from lack of air when he pulled free.

She collapsed, coughing, and then shoved with her elbows to get upright when the fingers in her pushed deeper at the new angle. Big, warm hands, the skin eerily leathery, cupped her face in a parody of amused affection.

And then she was looking up into his face, feeling her eyes stretch wide as a spooked horse's. His long, forked red tongue slid from his mouth and trailed across her chin, cleaning her cheek. She'd let some spill, she realized.

' _I told you to swallow_ ,' Molag Bal observed, coldly amused. ' _Mm. There will be plenty of time to train you better._ '

He pulled her upright. Malyani followed his directions, legs stumbling and body weaving almost drunkenly. She felt disoriented from the force of her orgasm and how terrifyingly close she felt to coming again. Slowly the fingers pulled out of her. She was empty now, raw, her breasts tender and jaw aching, and she looked up and up at him and knew it wasn't over yet.

His horned head dipped. He inspected her idly, as though contemplating at his leisure how to more thoroughly break her. Then one heavy, clawed hand gripped her arm.

One push wheeled her, staggering, towards the wall. ' _What did I suggest, in Markarth's streets?_ ' he mused. ' _Ah, yes. I remember now._ '

Long clawed fingers traced down her spine. They danced over older weals and made her arch helplessly, but that only pressed her front to the rock and then he didn't let her move back. He came closer until the awareness of his body and the hot bar of a new, merciless erection pressed inescapably inwards.

He sighed, sibilant and pleased. And that was all the warning she received before the head of his cock was pressing at her ass.

She had been stretched and he was slick from her mouth, but she still tried to scramble away. Her body wanted to resist his invasion, and a grating laugh crawled into her bones. One heavy hand on her hip was sufficient to hold her still. He pressed relentlessly inward. The head slid inside, she clenched helplessly around him, and then he got himself almost balls deep with two brutal thrusts.

Malyani _whined_ , on her toes and obscenely full of him. She panted open mouthed like a desperate animal. He gripped both her hips now and dragged her back, rocking himself, _adjusting_ himself as though finding the best angle for what he wanted to do.

And when he was done adjusting, he bent his head and sank his teeth into her throat again.

A thin, raw scream burst out of her. His jaws worked, deepening the bite, and then eased it as he started to fuck her ass. He _lapped_ at her blood, the slow and patient movements of his tongue the opposite of the hard, piercing movements of his hips.

While she was twisting, her body trapped between his and the wall, the phantom hands coalesced on her skin again. They clasped her breasts almost painfully, a pain she moaned helplessly at. Fingers worked into her sex, and heated physical fingers pressed against her mouth. Malyani instantly dropped her jaw, terrified of his claws scoring the inside of her mouth. But he hissed once more, ' _suck_ ,' and she could do nothing but obey.

One hand jerked her back against him. He was so deep in her he was wrenching almost constant noises out of her. She could hear her own voice as if from far away, begging incoherently, making animal sounds of near-pain. The fingers working in her sex, physical or not, pressed against the thin membrane separating them from his cock and made her feel all the more acutely filled.

How could a mortal take so much? Molag Bal snarled softly and shifted back; she scrabbled, ended up bent at the waist, and realized why only in time enough to brace herself before he began driving into her hard and fast. His fingers had slipped out of her mouth. His hips slapped at her and bestial grunts resounded second only to the wet sounds of their bodies. Of _her_ body, the phantom fingers fucking her sounding loud and clear.

Her world began and ended with the sensation of him deep and thick inside of her. He drove into her until she clawed the ground and all but mewled. She was sweat-slick and throbbing, pinioned and penetrated from every angle, and she knew he amused himself yet.

She surrendered to it. There was no conquering it, so she rode it - each sharp new wave of need and grasping pleasure. She pressed her forearms into the wall and almost wept with the pleasure wracking her wrung out body. All she could think was _I don't want to die_.

' _Another night, perhaps_ ,' he whispered. The trace of sound was mockingly soft, as if he truly hid his meaning from others. As if he needed to bother. ' _I'll well and truly fill you with my seed until it takes. For tonight, the anticipation will keep._ '

Malyani cried out, and her voice was lost. He pushed deep and hard, dragging her upright again and fucking viciously into her once, then again, irregular jerks of his hips that kept her dancing on her toes.

"I think you understand now, Malyani."

Understand what? What was there to understand, but that she doubted she would ever leave this stone room and she had half lost hope for escape.

He gave a low snarl that was terrifyingly close to satisfaction. "There is no escape from my eye, nor my dominion. There will _never_ be escape."

"Yes," she said, and in that instant she _did_ believe him. She knew, _knew_ , that she would never be free. She knew he'd rip the lungs from her body when he was done if she was lucky and _fuck_ , she sobbed for breath and orgasmed under the pressure of those harsh clever fingers knowing it. "My lord," she choked, "Molag Bal - "

She had no warning. His teeth ripped into her throat and she knew this time the bite was serious, irrevocably serious. She panicked, her body seizing like a hysterical rabbit's in a trap, and realizing that she only worsened the bite didn't help her stop.

Malyani screamed, a torn cry that winged out of her. The agony and the ectasy of orgasm surged through her, neither abating, and Molag Bal sank deep inside her and pinned her in place. She felt the shudder go through the crafted body behind her, but the guttural snarl of satisfaction swarmed up from the floor, through the soles of her feet and her trembling thighs.

' _Now_ ,' he intoned, ' _you are mine._ '

She had felt the spilling heat of his body's climax. And she felt the ground now as his arms faded and she crashed to her knees. Her body was limp and useless, and the stone greeted her cheek. She sobbed for breath, laying curled on the ground, her arms wrapped around her torso.

_I'm alive. I'm alive._

' _Report to Harkon for your next orders, champion,_ ' Molag Bal commanded, voice resonating into all the many marks he'd left on her. She needed a healing potion. She needed...she needed...

' _You belong to the night's embrace now._ '

Malyani squeezed her eyes shut and dug her nails into the floor. She was still alive. That was what mattered. Everything else could come with time.

**Author's Note:**

> And then she went and got a black soul gem and her vampiric ass cured and he had to hunt her down and take it out of her hide all over again!


End file.
